Who was Adolf Hitler?

Adolf Hitler was the most destructive political leader in human history — responsible for World War II, the Holocaust, and the deaths of tens of millions of people. Understanding who he was requires examining how an unremarkable Austrian became the architect of unprecedented catastrophe.

Hitler was born in Braunau am Inn, Austria, in 1889. His early life was marked by failure — he was rejected twice by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, lived in homeless shelters, and drifted through Vienna absorbing the antisemitic and pan-German nationalist ideas that pervaded the city's political culture. World War I gave him purpose: he served as a corporal on the Western Front, was wounded twice and gassed, and found in military service the belonging he had never experienced in civilian life. Germany's defeat and the humiliation of Versailles radicalized him.

Hitler joined the tiny German Workers' Party in 1919 and quickly became its most compelling speaker. He renamed it the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP or Nazi Party) and built it into a mass movement combining extreme nationalism, virulent antisemitism, anti-communism, and the cult of a charismatic leader — himself. After the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 and a brief imprisonment (during which he wrote Mein Kampf), he rebuilt the party for electoral competition.

The Great Depression provided his opportunity. As unemployment soared and the Weimar Republic's democratic institutions crumbled, millions of Germans turned to the Nazis. Hitler was appointed Chancellor in January 1933 and within months had established a totalitarian dictatorship — suppressing all opposition, controlling all media, building a secret police state (the Gestapo), and beginning the systematic persecution of Jews.

As dictator, Hitler pursued his two core obsessions: racial purity and territorial expansion. The Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of citizenship. Kristallnacht (1938) marked the escalation to organized violence. The war — which Hitler deliberately started by invading Poland in 1939 — was in his mind a racial struggle for Lebensraum (living space) in Eastern Europe. The Holocaust, the systematic murder of six million Jews, was the ultimate expression of his racial ideology.

Hitler's military leadership was initially successful — the conquests of Poland, France, and much of Europe seemed to validate his vision. But his strategic overreach — invading the Soviet Union in 1941 and declaring war on the United States — doomed Germany. As the war turned against him, Hitler became increasingly detached from reality, refusing to authorize retreats and blaming everyone but himself for the disasters. He committed suicide in his Berlin bunker on April 30, 1945, as Soviet forces closed in. His legacy is the most comprehensive warning in human history about the dangers of racism, totalitarianism, and the failure to defend democratic institutions.